The present disclosure relates to a ballistic radome, and more specifically, to a ballistic radome with an extended field of view.
A vehicle that needs to communicate with an off-board system may include one or more antennas. These antennas are often arranged in antenna arrays that include multiple transmission and reception modules. These antenna arrays are often referred to as electronically scanned arrays (ESAs). The ESAs for a given vehicle are generally disposed at an exterior of the vehicle so that data transmitted between the vehicle and the off-board system need not pass through the exterior of the vehicle. As such, the ESAs often need to be protected by one or more radomes that permit electromagnetic radiation of certain frequencies to be transmitted to and from the ESAs with little to no interference at wide angle ranges. Since these radomes are often located along with the ESAs at the exterior of the vehicle, the radomes are often also required to protect the ESAs from atmospheric conditions, such as humidity, and from impacts by foreign objects, such as armor piercing projectiles. Radomes that are particularly suited for such additional protection may be referred to as “ballistic radomes.” A ballistic radome can be much thicker than the conventional half-wave wall, A-sandwich, B-sandwich or C-sandwich radomes.
During vehicle use, if an ESA becomes non-functional, the area of electromagnetic radiation transmission that is affected by the lost ESA needs to be covered. Frequently, such coverage may be provided by the ESAs on either side of the non-functional ESA. In these cases, the functional ESAs may be configured to have extended respective fields of view (FOVs) to thereby provide some amount of coverage for the affected area. However, for ESAs that have ballistic radomes, the thick ballistic radomes may have to be unrealistically large in order to accommodate the extended FOVs. In other cases, the ballistic radomes may be provided with curved radome surfaces that allow for extended FOVs but cause distortion in the transmitted electromagnetic radiation.